This latest double offering from Eric Angelo Bessel, “Double Helix” and “Upstate, “acts as the companion pieces to last year’s album Mirror at Night album, and is built on the same sonic attitudes and approaches that was based on – space, silence, and deft use of delicate musical lines to carve out the merest of ambient structures from the void.
“Double Helix” exists at a point where drone and cinematics combine, a filmic type sound that immediately conjures images of the biggest of events, such as galaxies collapsing, or the smallest, genetic structures at work, as the title implies—and also music that seems built on a balance between ideas such as space and intimacy, drift and dream, memory and illusion.
It is the sound of atmosphere, given the gentlest of shapes, long, lingering notes that almost imperceptibly change over time, glacial in both their slow development and their ability to evoke something cool, calm, and colossal.
And, as always, Bessel’s music raises more questions than answers. It asks us where sonic art meets song; it questions whether obvious lyrics are ever as effective as the mood and emotion that instrumental music can convey; it asks, perhaps, what music even is, and whether it even needs the more expected structures of groove and melody to be effective. Bessel’s work suggests not.
Music for meditation but also for the inquiring mind, a sound so distant yet totally all encompassing, and all that with such minimal strokes of the sonic brush. How great is that?
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